Jessica Ghawi, in a photo from her Twitter account, moved to Colorado to pursue a sports broadcasting career.

Jessica Ghawi, in a photo from her Twitter account, moved to Colorado to pursue a sports broadcasting career.

Photo: Coutesy KABB

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Jessica Ghawi had a knack for finding positives out of negatives, and she planned to start a charity called “Little Things.”

Jessica Ghawi had a knack for finding positives out of negatives, and she planned to start a charity called “Little Things.”

Photo: HO, AFP/Getty Images

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Jessica Ghawi is seen in an undated photo taken from her twitter account July 20, 2012. The former San Antonio resident was killed in the "Dark Knight" movie premier shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Jessica Ghawi is seen in an undated photo taken from her twitter account July 20, 2012. The former San Antonio resident was killed in the "Dark Knight" movie premier shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Photo: PHOTO COURTRESY OF JORDAN GHAWI VIA TWITTER

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Tragic news spread via social media

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Seguin firefighter Jordan Ghawi sent the tweet just after 3:45 a.m. Friday: “It appears that my sister has been fatally wounded in a mass shooting at a movie premiere in Denver, CO.”

That 104-character message on Twitter about Jessica Ghawi flew into cyberspace about two hours after police in suburban Denver had received the first reports of a shooting at a movie theater complex — a massacre that would leave 12 dead and 58 wounded, many critically.

“I was trying to create some sort of aggregate for family and friends, to keep them informed,” Ghawi said in a phone interview Friday afternoon after he had flown to Denver. “This is a tool that I had available that I've seen used for good so many times, that I just knew that it was the tool for me now.”

He added: “It would have not been possible without using some social media to keep in touch.”

By Friday evening: that tweet — the second of at least 17 that day — had been shared about 150 times and the blog post he put up about the shooting, which he updated throughout the day, had received more than 600 comments.

Boy carted off in ambulance after S.A. shooting as relatives scream in anguishSan Antonio Express-News

That short burst of communication became another example of how entrenched social networks have become in American culture today.

The story of Jessica's death had spread far and wide — noted film critic Roger Ebert mentioned it in a column he wrote for The New York Times about the violence.

“In the pre-Internet age, there was a round of phone calls that got made, so family members heard directly from their loved ones about something happening,” said Lee Rainie, director of Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, which studies how the Internet is changing society.

He added: “Now they're just as likely, if not more likely, to hear about it on a social media platform” because it gets information to the people who need it quickly and it creates a sort of memorial for the person who recently died.

On Jordan Ghawi's blog, he posted a photo of his sister, a link to a YouTube video of her and a running account of his day. One of the last posts read:

“Essentially, she died quickly and painlessly. Now we will begin the process of bringing her home to celebrate her life.”

By Friday evening, his growing followers on Twitter exceeded 4,200.

While the concept of sharing bits of our personal lives existed well before Facebook or Twitter, the rise of social networks allow people to spread the word more quickly than before.

“There is an immediacy to it, there is a speed to it, breadth to it that we've never seen before in the human experience. Individuals have now become broadcasters,” Rainie said.

The speed and volume of information that social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, can deliver also has changed the way that news organizations interact with their readers and cover the news.

“When I can pull and see from multiple sources ... when I can see that and evaluate that information collectively on a single platform, it totally changes the game,” said Daniel Petty, social media editor at The Denver Post.

He said that Twitter has become a sort of early warning system for their newsroom when it comes to tracking breaking news stories, especially during the overnight hours.

Within an hour of the shooting, they had issued their first news bulletin and an hour after that, the Post had published its first story about the shooting online.

“A lot of is people expressing emotion and opinion about it, which is valuable, but I'm looking for news value in particular,” he said.